The Dark Age
The Dark Age (June - September 2007) followed The Age of Decline and was known for disastrous events and a dramatic decline in TLDR posting. Events such as Pint Cassidy and the Zorgdance Kid, Haze's Rampage, Lazrik's Fakation, The Database Disaster, and The Jchan Fiasco made this age the worst in TLDR history. The Decline of TLDR As summer had approached the previous year, TLDR had exploded with energy and an age of war had been born, but when summer 2007 began, little changed on the TLDR. The Siege of IFAP seemed to have failed, many areas of the site had fallen into disrepair or been deleted, several regulars had vanished, and posts-per-day were at an all-time low. A day after the TLDR's two-year anniversary, Lazrik decided to restart the wiki in an attempt to garner more excitement among TLDRers, but it received little attention. Moki's "Nudes" Considered by many to be the original OT forum goddess, Moki was a legendary camwhore who had perused the OT and various OT spinoff forums for years. She had been visiting TLDR on and off for approximately a year, her posts few and far between. Her opinion of the forum was relatively low, although she claimed to have defended TLDR elsewhere on one occasion. The few pictures that she had posted had been gaining circulation on 4chan, and now /b/tards had hacked her Photobucket, producing a series of revealing nude pictures which were promptly posted on the TLDR. The resulting thread grew to dozens of pages long, TLDRers reveling in the epic development, but some female posters such as Mitten and Thornapple felt that Moki's privacy had been betrayed. Cream set to work plastering the images in every location on the TLDR that he possibly could, but the incident took a disappointing and hilarious turn when Moki showed up and pointed out that the blurry nude images were not of her at all. The Coming of the Subforums The drugs and music subforums suddenly sprang up between the gaming and porn subforums. The drugs subforum was the result of the sizable pothead population of TLDR that grown sick of being told that drugs were evil, along with non-potheads growing tired of drug threads "cluttering" up the main forum. The music subforum had been an afterthought of Lazrik and soon became the media subforum, encompassing music, television, and film. This left anti-subforum advocates wondering what exactly the main forum was now for. The porn and gaming subforums had both been fixtures on TheTLDR.org since its conception. The porn subforum was loved or tolerated by all, but the gaming subforum had been a source of heated off-and-on debate since its first day, believed by some to be unnecessary and divisionary, splitting up topics and making the TLDR seem more inactive than it actually was. But since both Lazrik and Nigma favored the subforum, it had remained. Only several people opposed the creation of the newest subforums at first. Surprisingly, core members such as knightwhosaysgg and HellPenguin were in favor of this new divided TLDR. Lazrik held that he was simply doing what the majority of people wanted. Pint Cassidy and the Zorgdance Kid Pintsized and Zorg, longtime regulars of OTR heritage, had become increasingly frustrated with the current state of things and we intent on leaving. They decided that they were going to go out with a bang, carrying out what they thought would be a devastating attack on the TLDR. Pintsized was moderator of the subforums and had the ability to move threads into them from the main forum. He targeted the longest threads first, moving a great many of them to the subforum and then deleting them. Zorg and Pintsized then taunted the TLDR and announced that they would be leaving forever, jokingly designating themselves "Pint Cassidy and the Zorgdance Kid". The two culprits left, though unknown to them, Lazrik had organized the forum so that nothing could be directly deleted. Instead, threads and posts were moved to a secret invisible forum, where Lazrik was able to easily retrieve the lost data. Their attack had been an utter failure. They both eventually returned. Lazrik's Social Revolution Proposal Lazrik posted an extremely lengthy and ambitious paragraphs-long plan to return the TLDR to its glory days in response to the forum's recent noticeable decline. It involved increasing advertising dramatically and using the new subforums to attract people from all corners of the internet. TLDRers were caught up in the excitement and set about brainstorming additional ideas and thinking of other ways in which they could help out. The rep system was also reinstated during this time, resulting in mild protest from Clamz. Most of his original Rep Alliance support seemed to have dwindled by this time, so the rep system remained. Haze's Rampage Along with totally redesigning TheTLDR.org's front page and restoring rep, one of the first and last major actions Lazrik took to work toward his vision of a new TLDR was to assemble a "mod squad" of four people to replace Pintsized, one for each subforum. Their job would be to ensure the subforums' success by moving topics that were mistakenly posted in the main forum into their respective subforums. This mod squad included Colonel Cow, Haze, knightwhosaysgg, and Dubbus. Later that night, Haze started a poll asking whether or not he should use his newfound privileges to delete everything. After the poll's participants, thinking it was a joke, indicated that he should, Haze went on a rampage. Deleted threads could simply be moved back from the deleted forum, as Pintsized had proved a week earlier, but Haze knew that there was no way to un-merge threads. He merged approximately 75,000 posts, leaving a 5,048-page thread in the gaming subforum. The TLDR went into chaos the next day. Half of the threads ever posted were now gone. A backup could not be used to restore the lost data because Lazrik had not made one. This, along with the fact that Lazrik had been so careless as to who he'd given mod powers to, caused him to come under overwhelming criticism. Xtortion, a regular for more than a year and a half, announced that he was leaving. Mitten, now posting under an alt account, several days before had already exclaimed that she was only going to drop in from time to time from then on. Doomsayers predicted that the rising rate of departure for TLDR regulars, along with the recent disasters, were further evidence that TLDR was in its death throes. Lazrik's Fakation and the End of the Subforums Suffering the strongest criticism he had been under since The Lazrik Riots, Lazrik announced that he was going on a vacation with his girlfriend until December, leaving everyone both baffled and, in some cases, overjoyed. Why would anyone take a four-month-long vacation, and who knew that Lazrik had a girlfriend? Their questions went unanswered, for Lazrik fulfilled his promise, leaving a ravaged, unhappy, and lawless TLDR to fend for itself. Most believed that Lazrik was attempting to discredit his critics by leaving the TLDR to its own devices while he watched from the shadows, while others believed that he had given up on the TLDR entirely and was simply going to let the site's subscription run out. In the wake of Lazrik's departure, Morek — a longtime opponent of the subforms — decided to take advantage of the lack of authority to further his anti-subforum agenda. During Haze's rampage, every thread from the media and drug subforums had been lost, leaving blank subforums in the place of what had been, a day before, active and lively centers of discussion. Morek silently began moving every new thread that was created in them back into the main forum, keeping the two subforums empty and barren. As people, frustrated that their threads kept relocating, began to figure out what was going on, they became angry at Morek. Shortly afterward, NickLachey, who was also anti-subforum, decided to remove the two subforums completely, leaving only the original gaming and porn subforums. Pro-subforum members were outraged and complained to Nigma, who, instead of remaking the subforums or investigating further, decided to simply remove everyone's mod powers to prevent further abuse. However, NickLachey would not have internet access for several more days, leaving TLDR completely leaderless, so he promoted Colonel Cow to admin and, contrary to Nigma's wishes, restored Morek and Clamz to their moderator positions. The Database Disaster Less than a month into his fakation, Lazrik returned due to high resource-usage emails he was receiving from his host. Believing that the source of the problem was the 5,048-page thread left over from Haze's Rampage which was now sitting in the deleted forum, he attempted to remove it permanently. But the enormous thread's deletion corrupted the database, spawning IPS driver errors and rendering TLDR unusable. Colonel Cow managed to divert panicked members to DoS for approximately thirty minutes before Lazrik wiped the database clean, deleting every thread that had survived Haze's Rampage, as well as the three weeks-worth of threads that had been posted since. Once again, TLDRers, numbed from constant disaster and with their numbers dwindling, were forced to start over. This resulted in another public outcry against Lazrik, who admitted that his entire vacation story had been a lie. In the midst of the despair that followed the disaster, Nigma, perhaps in response to all of the complaining, decided to promote Morek to admin and Scyle to moderator. The TLDR now had five admins and two moderators, a sizable percentage of the forum's shrinking population. It was commented that IFAP rejects were slowly taking the place of TLDR regulars who were no longer active. The Root of the Problem The debate over whether "IFAGS" (a derogative that was being applied to IFAP immigrants) should be banned had never truly died since it had begun the previous Spring following the influx of new posters, but constant disaster had distracted TLDR from the issue. It was gaining strength again, with Scyle ambitiously proclaiming that IFAP immigrants were the cause of TLDR's decline, while most members either didn't care or still insisted that lack of banning was vital to TLDR remaining a free forum. The term "newfag", adopted from 4chan lexicon, began to become widely used in reference to newer members. The Jchan Fiasco With the situation on TLDR beginning to stabilize, there not having been a disaster in almost two weeks, Lazrik revealed his next plan to put TLDR on the map: Jchan. It would be another Chan site just like the popular 4chan, 7chan, 12chan, and 420chan, only it would be a comical play on words centering around Jackie Chan. The site would also have a direct link to TLDR in its index. If Jchan gained as much popularity as the other Chan spin-offs, it was assumed that TLDR would be overwhelmed with more members, permanently ending the forum's dark age. Lazrik launched the site with its own domain name, Jchan.us, and TLDRers began to spam its link across 4chan along with pictures of Jackie Chan. Jchan immediately saw a burst of activity, mostly spam, which, as the night went on, turned to child porn as 4channers realized they could post anything they wanted. Lazrik seemed unconcerned. Later that night, angered at the constant Jchan spam, a 4chan member posted the whois information about the site and reported it to its host for child porn. As a result, the TLDR was suspended for over twelve hours until the following afternoon, causing more anger to be directed toward Lazrik for his endless disastrous schemes. Fortunately, no posts had been lost during this incident. Jchan had to be taken off-line until Lazrik could find a host that would tolerate porn. A Last Resort The Jchan plan had been a bust, and although the worst appeared to be behind them, TLDR was still mostly dead and showed no signs of changing anytime soon. Although Morek had been Scyle's chief opponent on IFAP and immigration issues, he decided to take a chance and promoted Scyle to admin in the hopes that his ambitions could turn TLDR around. Navigation <<-The Age of Decline------Index------The Age of Scylightenment->> Category:TLDR History Category:History